The past decade has been marked by a technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry with the consumer electronics industry. The effect has, in turn, driven technologies that have been known and available but relatively quiescent over the years. A major one of these technologies is the Internet or Web. The convergence of the electronic entertainment and consumer industries with data processing exponentially accelerated the demand for wide ranging communication distribution channels, and the Web or Internet, which had quietly existed for over a generation as a loose academic and government data distribution facility, reached “critical mass” and commenced a period of phenomenal expansion. With this expansion, businesses and consumers have direct access to all matter of databases providing documents, media and computer programs through related distribution of Web documents, e.g. Web pages or electronic mail. Because of the ease with which documents are distributable via the Web, it has become a major source of data. Virtually all databases of public information throughout the world are accessible and able to be searched via the Web.
The ease with which great volumes of data may be searched from a computer attached to the Internet and equipped with a Web browser has led to the development of widespread electronic commerce over the Web. At the present time, it is becoming very rare to find a business organization of any kind that does not transact some aspect of the business via the Web.
The accessing of data from the Web is in the form of Web documents, e.g. Web pages available from Web sites that maintain databases of information from which such Web documents are formed. This is conventionally done via a Web browser installed at the receiving station that accesses the Web sites. A great many of these Web document transactions can be implemented without requiring the user at a receiving Web display station to login at the Web site providing the transaction in order to receive a Web document. However, where the hosts of the Web sites regard the transactions involving Web documents as more serious or are more protective of their databases, such Web sites require the user requesting documents to login at the Web site. This is particularly the case where electronic commerce is involved. The login may, of course, be any conventional login wherein the user is asked to provide specific information and may have to use an I.D, or password to facilitate login. In serious business and academic pursuits via the Web, it is not unusual for a user in a single session to be logged in to several Web sites. Some of these logins may be cascaded, i.e. the user is logged into a second Web through a first Web site that he initially logged into.
It will, thus, be understood that it would be important for a user who is ending a particular session on the Web to logout of the logged into Web sites. Closing a Web session by a user who leaves some dangling logons, i.e. the user is off the Web but still has not logged off one or more logged on Web sites, can be troublesome to the user who may be charged for logon time or at least be using up logon time allotted to him on a monthly basis. Likewise, it could be troublesome to the Web site hosts who may have to allocate resources to serve the dangling logon. In addition, if the Web site is a secure site, the failure to logoff would present security problems.